Tag Archives: Kay Redfield Jamison

Six Degrees of Separation is a meme hosted by Kate over at Books Are My Favourite and Best. It works like this: each month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. A book doesn’t need to be connected to all the others on the list, only to the one next to it in the chain.

This month we’re starting with Mara Wilson’s Where Am I Now?: True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame which I’ve not read but I gather is about Wilson’s experiences of being a child star in movies such as Mrs Doubtfire, Miracle on 34th Street and Matilda. She grew up to become a writer but continued her acting work as part of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast team whose fabulous show I’ve seen on stage. I know – it’s a podcast – but trust me it works.

Emma Tennant’s Girlitude is about a protracted girlhood, covering the early years of Tennant’s life from 1955 when she became a debutante and entered the ‘marriage market’. Tennant departed from the straight and narrow with a turbulent love affair, briefly getting back on track with her marriage to Henry Green’s son before taking up a semi-nomadic life, frequently attracted to unsuitable men.

Later in life Tennant penned a series of successful ‘tributes’ to Jane Austen’s novels, although not to Mansfield Park in which Fanny Price is taken in by her wealthy cousins eager to remind her of the poverty of her origins. With the arrival of the frivolous Crawfords it soon becomes clear that Fanny’s morals are infinitely superior to her cousins’.

I read Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories many years ago, long before I’d learned to savour a collection of short stories rather than inhaling the entire book in one go. As a result, I remember very little about them apart from an impression of fine writing

Katherine Mansfield was a New Zealander as is C. K. Stead whose The Necessary Angel I read and very much enjoyed earlier in the year. Set in Paris in 2014, it’s about a professor at the Sorbonne and the three women who play significant parts in his life during the year the novel spans. Polished, witty and intelligent, it manages to be both cerebral and thoroughly entertaining.

Janet Frame’s autobiographical trilogy, An Angel at My Table, is more sobering than entertaining although it does have a happy ending. Frame was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman and confined to an asylum from which she was liberated after winning a national literary prize.

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind is also an account of mental illness. Jameson’s bipolarity afflicted her as a young medical student and continued to do so for most of her adult life. After years of struggling with vivid but destructive manic episodes followed by paralysing depressions, Jamison sought help and went on to become one of the foremost American practitioners in its treatment.

This month’s Six Degrees of Separation has taken me from a child actor’s memoir to a striking account of mental illness. Part of the fun of this meme is comparing the very different routes other bloggers take from each month’s starting point. If you’re interested, you can follow it on Twitter with the hashtag #6Degrees, check out the links over at Kate’s blog or perhaps even join in.